Part 28 (2/2)

”Poisoned!” cried the lady-friends, turning up the whites of their eyes. ”Oh! gracious goodness!--you have done it, doctor!”

”What do you accuse me of?” asked the doctor, with surprise.

”I accuse you--of--killing me--ee,” responded the wife, doing her best to imitate a death-struggle.

”Ladies,” answered the doctor, with admirable _nonchalance_, bowing to Mrs. Cadogan's bosom a.s.sociates, ”it is perfectly false. You are quite welcome to open her at once, and then you'll discover the calumny.”

John Hunter administered a scarcely less startling reproof to his wife, who, though devoted in her attachment to him, and in every respect a lady worthy of esteem, caused her husband at times no little vexation by her fondness for society. She was in the habit of giving enormous routs, at which authors and artists, of all shades of merit and demerit, used to a.s.semble to render homage to her literary powers, which were very far from common-place. A lasting popularity has attested the excellence of her song:--

”My mother bids me bind my hair With bands of rosy hue; Tie up my sleeves with ribbons rare, And lace my boddice blue.

”'For why,' she cries, 'sit still and weep, While others dance and play?'

Alas! I scarce can go or creep, While Lubin is away.

”'Tis sad to think the days are gone, When those we love are near; I sit upon this mossy stone, And sigh when none can hear.

”And while I spin my flaxen thread, And sing my simple lay, The village seems asleep or dead, Now Lubin is away.”

John Hunter had no sympathy with his wife's poetical aspirations, still less with the society which those aspirations led her to cultivate. Grudging the time which the labours of practice prevented him from devoting to the pursuits of his museum and laboratory he could not restrain his too irritable temper when Mrs. Hunter's frivolous amus.e.m.e.nts deprived him of the quiet requisite for study.

Even the fee of a patient who called him from his dissecting instruments could not reconcile him to the interruption. ”I must go,”

he would say reluctantly to his friend Lynn, when the living summoned him from his investigations among the dead, ”and earn this d----d guinea, or I shall be sure to want it to-morrow.” Imagine the wrath of such a man, finding, on his return from a long day's work, his house full of musical professors, connoisseurs, and fas.h.i.+onable idlers--in fact, all the confusion and hubbub and heat of a grand party, which his lady had forgotten to inform him was that evening to come off!

Walking straight into the middle of the princ.i.p.al reception-room, he faced round and surveyed his unwelcome guests, who were not a little surprised to see him--dusty, toilworn, and grim--so unlike what ”the man of the house” ought to be on such an occasion.

”I knew nothing,” was his brief address to the astounded crowd--”I knew nothing of this kick-up, and I ought to have been informed of it beforehand; but, as I have now returned home to study, I hope the present company will retire.”

Mrs Hunter's drawing-rooms were speedily empty.

One of the drollest love stories in medical ana is that which relates to Dr. Thomas Dawson, a century since alike admired by the inhabitants of Hackney as a pulpit orator and a physician. Dawson was originally a Suffolk worthy, unconnected, however, with the eccentric John Dawson, who, in the reign of Charles the Second, was an apothecary in the pleasant old town of Framlingham, in that county. His father, a dissenting minister, had seven sons, and educated six of them for the Nonconformist pulpit. Of these six, certainly three joined the Established Church, and became rectors--two of the said three, Benjamin and Abraham, being controversial writers of considerable merit. Thomas Dawson adhered to the tenets of his father, and, combining the vocations of divine and physic-man, preached on Sundays, and doctored during the rest of the week. He was Mead and Mead's father in one: though the conditions of human existence, which render it impossible for one person to be in two places at the same time, prevented him from leaving chapel to visit his patients, and the next minute urging the congregation to offer up a prayer for the welfare of the unfortunate sufferers. Amongst the doctor's circle of acquaintance Miss Corbett of Hackney was at the same time the richest, the most devout, and the most afflicted in bodily health. Ministering to her body and soul, Dr. Dawson had frequent occasions for visiting her. One day he found her alone, sitting with the large family Bible before her, meditating on perhaps the grandest chapter in all the Old Testament. The doctor read the words to which the forefinger of her right hand pointed--the words of Nathan to David: ”_Thou art the man_.” The doctor took the hint; and on the 29th of May, 1758, he found a wife--and the pious lady won a husband. The only offspring of this strange match was one son, a Mr. Dawson, who still resides at a very advanced age of life in the charming village of Botesdale, in Suffolk. When the writer of these pages was a happy little boy, making his first acquaintance with Latin and Greek, at the Botesdale Grammar School, then presided over by the pious, manly, and gentle ----, he was an especial pet with Mr. Dawson. The worthy gentleman's little house was in the centre of a large garden, densely stocked with apple and other fruit trees; and in it he led a very retired life, visited by only a very few friends, and tended by two or three servants--of whom one, an ancient serving man, acted as a valet, gardener, and groom to an antique horse which const.i.tuted Mr. Dawson's entire stud.

The small urchin before-mentioned had free access at all times to the venerable gentleman, and used to bring him the gossip of the town and school, in exchange for apples and other substantial gifts. Thin and attenuated, diminutive, so as to be little more than a dwarf, with vagrant eager eye, hooked as to his nose, and with a long beard, snowy-white, streaming over his waistcoat, the octogenarian used to receive his fair-haired child-visitor. May he be happy--as may all old gentlemen be, who are kind to little schoolboys, and give them apples and ”tips!”

The day that Abernethy was married he went down to the lecture-room to deliver his customary instruction to his pupils. His selection of a wife was as judicious as his marriage was happy; and the funny stories for long current about the mode in which he made his offer are known to be those most delusive of fabrications, fearless and extreme exaggerations of a little particle of the truth. The brutality of procedure attributed to the great surgeon by current rumour was altogether foreign to his nature. The Abernethy biscuit was not more audaciously pinned upon his reputation, than was the absurd falsehood that when he made his offer to his future wife he had only seen her once, and then wrote saying he should like to marry her, but as he was too busy to ”make love,” she must entertain his proposal without further preliminaries, and let him know her decision by the end of the week.

Of Sir John Eliot the fortunate, mention has already been made in this chapter. Let us now speak of John Eliot, the luckless hero of a biography published in 1787, under the t.i.tle of ”A Narrative of the Life and Death of John Eliot, M.D., containing an account of the Rise, Progress, and Catastrophe of his unhappy pa.s.sion for Miss Mary Boydell.” A native of Somersets.h.i.+re, John Elliot wrote a tragedy when only twelve years of age, and after serving an apprentices.h.i.+p to a London apothecary, fell in love with one Miss Mary Boydell, a niece of a city alderman. The course of this gentleman's love ran smoothly till he chanced, by evil fortune, to read an announcement in a newspaper, that a Miss Boydell had, on the previous day, been led to the altar by some gentleman--not called Dr. John Elliot, certainly not himself.

Never doubting that _the_ Miss Boydell of the newspaper was _his_ Miss Boydell, the doctor, without making any further inquiries after the perfidious fair one, sold his shop and fixtures, and ran off from the evil city of heartless women, to commune with beasts of the field and birds of the air in sylvan retirement. Not a little chagrined was Miss Boydell at the sudden disappearance of her ideal apothecary, whom her uncle, the alderman, stigmatized in round, honest, indignant language, as a big blackguard. After twelve years spent in wandering, ”a forlorn wretch, over the kingdom,” Dr. Elliott returned to London, set up once more in business, and began, for a second time, to drive a thriving trade, when Delilah again crossed his path. ”One day,” he says, telling his own story, ”entering my shop (for I had commenced again the business of apothecary) I found two ladies sitting there, one of whom I thought I could recognize. As soon as she observed me, she cried out, 'Mr. Elliot! Mr. Elliot!' and fell back in a swoon. The well-known voice struck me like a shock of electricity--my affections instantly gushed forth--I fell senseless at her feet. When I came to myself, I found Miss Boydell sitting by my side.” And _his_ Miss Boydell was Miss Boydell still--innocent of wedlock.

Imogene being proved true, and Alonzo having come to life, the youthful couple renewed the engagement entered into more than twelve years before. The wedding-day was fixed, the wedding-clothes were provided, when uncle (the alderman), distrustful that his niece's scranny lover would make a good husband, induced her at the last moment to jilt him, and marry Mr. Nicols, an opulent bookseller. The farce was now to wear an aspect of tragedy. Infuriated at being, after all, _really_ deceived, Dr. Elliot bought two brace of pistols, and bound them together in pairs. One pair he loaded only with powder; into the other he put the proper quantum of lead, as well as the pernicious dust. Armed with these weapons, he lay in wait for the destroyer of his peace. After some days of watching he saw her in Prince's Street, walking with the triumphant Nicols. Rus.h.i.+ng up, he fired at her the two pistols (not loaded with ball), and then s.n.a.t.c.hing the other brace from his pocket, was proceeding to commit suicide, when he was seized by the bystanders and disarmed.

The next scene in the drama was the princ.i.p.al court of the Old Bailey, with Dr. Elliot in the dock, charged with an attempt to murder Miss Boydell. The jury, being satisfied that the pistols were not loaded with ball, and that the prisoner only intended to create a startling impression on Miss Boydell's mind, acquitted him of that charge, and he was remanded to prison to take his trial for a common a.s.sault.

Before this second inquiry, however, could come off, the poor man died in Newgate, July 22, 1787, of a broken heart--or jail fever. Ere his death, he took a cruel revenge of the lady, by writing an autobiographic account of his love experiences, in which appeared the following pa.s.sage:--”Fascinated as I was by the charms of this faithless woman, I had long ceased to be sensible to these defects, or rather my impa.s.sioned imagination had converted them into perfections.

But those who did not labour under the power of this magic were struck by her ungraceful exterior, and mine ears have not unfrequently been shocked to hear the tongue of indifference p.r.o.nounce that the object of my pa.s.sion was _ugly and deformed_. Add to this, that Miss Boydell has long since ceased to boast the bloom of youth, and then let any person, impartial and unprejudiced, decide whether a pa.s.sion for her, so violent as that I have manifested, could be the produce of a slight and recent acquaintance, or whether it must not rather be the consequence of a long habit and inveterate intimacy.” Such was the absurd sad story of John Elliot, author of ”The Medical Almanack,”

”Elements of the Branches of Natural Philosophy,” and ”Experiments and Observations on Light and Colours.”

The mournful love-story of Dr. John Elliot made a deep impression on the popular mind. It is found alluded to in ballads and chap-books, and more than one penny romance was framed upon it. Not improbably it suggested the composition of the following parody of Monk Lewis's ”Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene,” which appeared at the close of the last century, during the first run of popularity which that familiar ballad obtained:--

”GILES BOLUS THE KNAVE AND BROWN SALLY GREEN.

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